Woman recalls 'terrible' assault in New Haven 10 years ago

NEW HAVEN -- The then-16-year-old high school student stood frozen as the man walked toward her in the darkness, firing a machine gun into a crowd of people outside a corner convenience store just down the street from her house.

"My friends ran, but I was so afraid of getting shot in my back that I wouldn't run," Michele Crutchfield, now 27, recalled about that night a decade ago.

"I remember my mom running down the street. Guys were on the ground screaming that they got shot.

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"It was just terrible."

Crutchfield spent nine days in the hospital with gunshot wounds to her abdomen and leg. One man died. Four others were wounded.

At the time, the shooting rekindled fears of a resurgence of the horrific gang violence that had plagued the city a decade earlier, when organized gangs at the height of the crack epidemic mercilessly defended their turf.

"I'm not going to sleep until these people are arrested and locked up," now-retired Police Chief Melvin H. Wearing said at the time.

It was October 2001, five years before the fatal shootings of 13-year-olds a month apart shook the consciousness of the city and sparked soul-searching about a resurgence of youth violence.

Before Jujuana Cole and Justus Suggs, there was Michele Crutchfield.

But she survived.

In her hospital room with a gunshot wound to her abdomen, she worried about whether she would be able to ever have children, she recalls.

"It didn't hit any major organs, but we were still worried," she said. "I was so young."

Today, the city's homicide rate has soared to early-1990s levels. A new police chief is reinstituting community policing and looking for solutions to the violence that leaves entire neighborhoods living in fear.

Looking back a decade, community concerns that the shooting at Orchard and Edgewood streets was a harbinger of the return of the "bad old days" was unfounded. There were 20 homicides in New Haven in 2001. In 2002, there were nine. A year later, there were eight, celebrated as the lowest homicide rate in four decades.

Still, the Oct. 12, 2001, shooting is the worst -- at least in terms of the number of victims -- in the city in at least 15 years. Six people were shot, one fatally. Seventy-three shots were fired, most from a fully automatic assault rife that had been stolen days earlier in a burglary.

Some of the five suspects were members of the Wild Wild West gang. The group went to Dwight Kensington looking to settle a grudge with members of the Tre Blood gang. Two days before the shooting, there was a fight at a Westville restaurant. What happened at Orchard and Edgewood was payback.

The five men got out of a brown Lincoln Continental and walked to the corner. There, two of them opened fire. None of the victims was an intended target. The rival gang members escaped unharmed.

Crutchfield wasn't as lucky. And John Thomas, 22, died.

"I was just at the corner store," said Crutchfield. She and her friends planned to go to a late movie.

She saw the one gunman turn the corner and open fire on the crowd.

Crutchfield still lives in the same apartment she did in 2001. She doesn't feel unsafe. People's houses don't get burglarized much, she says. She's known some of her neighbors for 20 years.

As it turns out, she would later learn, one of the men who opened fire that night was her best friend's brother. Police wanted her to testify at his trial. She appeared in court.

"I couldn't really remember much," she said recently. It made things more complicated in her mind that authorities wanted her to testify against her friend's brother.

"It was kind of an awkward situation. I've lived here for 26 years. And it (the bullet) wasn't meant for me."

Ten years have passed. Crutchfield is attending Lincoln Technical School pursuing training in the medical field. She has a baby.

One of the five men convicted in the shooting already is out of prison. Markese Kelley, now 33, was discharged to community release in June after serving 10 years.

Shaunte Little, 31, and Franki Jones, 32, are scheduled to be released in 2015. Marquis Mitchell, 30, was sentenced to 30 years.

Mashawn Greene, 34, the man with the machine gun, was sentenced to 60 years. He will be in his 80s when he is eligible for release.